The Emergence of “The New Accounting History”
Nicolae-Ionut Bertalan* and Christopher J. Napier
Correspondence
Address
School of Management
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX
UK
Telephone:
E-mail:
+44 1784 276121
Nicolae-Ionut.Bertalan.2013@live.rhul.ac.uk
christopher.napier@rhul.ac.uk
* Corresponding Author
DRAFT: Not for quotation without the authors’ consent
The Emergence of “The New Accounting History”
ABSTRACT
“The New Accounting History” (NAH) is usually associated with a special issue of
Accounting, Organizations and Society published in 1991, although publications
within this research tradition had been appearing for at least 10 years before this. The
present paper examines the emergence of NAH in the decade or so before this special
issue, and studies the way in which Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper and Richard
Laughlin, in their introduction to this special issue, defined NAH, the diverse
literatures to which they appealed, and the extent to which the other papers in the
special issue reflected the emerging notion of NAH.
Key words: accounting history, new accounting history, Michel Foucault, Bruno
Latour.
The Emergence of “The New Accounting History”
Introduction
Accounting as a subject of systematic academic study and accounting history as an important
research subfield had undergone significant changes in the period between 1970 and 1990,
challenging old customs and shaping new directions for future accounting history research.
New theories from related fields like sociology, history and economics were adopted as
research frames or simply inspired researchers interested in accounting history. Another
turning point was the growing interest shown by researchers from other fields of research for
accounting history. And by their involvement in the historical dimension of accounting these
interdisciplinary researchers also brought information, different views and their initial
background training, changing the hitherto dominant perspective on accounting history.
In this paper, we study the emergence of “the new accounting history” as a different way of
looking into this field of research. “The new accounting history” (NAH henceforth) emerged
in opposition to “old” (or “traditional”) accounting history. But was NAH an obvious
“enemy” of traditional accounting historians? Did those who introduced this approach want
to impose a different research direction? Is cohabitation, even confluence, of the two
perspectives, something to be accepted as a favourable development, or does the discipline of
accounting history actually gain from a conflict between the “traditional” and “new”
approaches? Although there have been various explorations of the background that led NAH
to arise and the contextual influences, both external and internal, that shaped accounting
history in such a way to give “birth” to this epistemology, they are often partial, not only in
the sense of covering only certain aspects but also in the sense of being written from
particular viewpoints.
The name “The New Accounting History” was applied to the double issue 5-6 of volume 16
of the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), published in 1991, which was
introduced by an article by Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper and Richard Laughlin (henceforth
“MHL”). Research that could be described as “new accounting history” had, however, been
appearing for at least a decade before this double issue. In the first section we provide a
genealogical perspective of the circumstances that led to NAH. This section incorporates
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three important aspects of that genealogy: the catalysts that helped NAH to emerge, the
context in which it emerged, and the forerunners of NAH. The second section of this paper is
an analysis of the MHL (1991) article that introduced “the new accounting history”, and an
assessment of the extent to which other papers published in the double issue fell within the
NAH category.
Tentative moves towards a new accounting history
Catalysts for the emergence of NAH
Hopwood (1983) called on researchers to study accounting in the contexts in which it
operates, and this implies that we should study NAH in context. As we will observe in the
next section, NAH is significant more for what it is not than for what it is. Adopting a
genealogical approach we will present in the following paragraphs what in particular NAH
reacted against. Without a complex of factors the appearance of NAH would have not been
possible. We call these factors key catalysts in the changing process that accounting went
through in that particular period of time and the emergence of NAH.
The construction of our examination starts with one simple question: What was necessary for
“The New Accounting History” to emerge? This question leads to two sub-questions: first,
What was necessary for critical accounting to emerge? and second, What did critical
accounting find lacking in historical accounting research? The first question has been
addressed by Roslender and Dillard (2003), in their study of the emergence of the
interdisciplinary perspectives on accounting project. They note that “critical” and
“interdisciplinary” are often used interchangeably. Roslender and Dillard (2003) suggest that
the “birthplace” of the interdisciplinary/critical movement in accounting was the University
of Sheffield in the 1970s, with Tony Lowe and Tony Tinker as key figures. Richard
Laughlin, who was also at Sheffield during this period, told us (interview 10 June 2013) that
the Sheffield group rejected the “normative” accounting theories that focused on income
measurement and asset valuation, but also rejected the increasing application of neo-classical
economic theories in accounting research. Lowe looked towards systems thinking to
understand accounting practice, while Tinker’s Marxist approach was grounded in a notion of
“historical materialism”. Hence the interdisciplinary/critical project was open to historical
research. However, much extant historical research, even though of high quality, was
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undertaken by academics and others who were amateur historians, and the research tended to
lack a theoretical framework.
The journal Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), founded by Anthony Hopwood
in 1976, was probably the most important accounting research journal to promote critical
accounting research as a way to search for alternative paradigms. In two early editorials
(Hopwood, 1976, 1977), historical research was presented as an important way of enhancing
a study of the practice of accounting and its broader organizational and social impacts. In its
first ten years, AOS published only 13 accounting history papers out of a total of some 300
papers (Napier, 2006, p.447), but these included seminal historical studies by Tinker (1980)
and Tinker et al. (1982) – Tinker had by now moved from the UK to the USA – as well as the
seminal “Foucauldian” study of value added statements by Burchell et al. (1985). By the end
of the 1980s critical accounting was already acknowledged as a “paradigmatically separate
field” of research (Baker, 2011, p.209). The dependence of NAH on the interdisciplinary/
critical paradigm can be seen from a definition of critical accounting given by Richard
Laughlin, one of the authors of NAH article:
A critical understanding of the role of accounting processes and practices and the
accounting profession in the functioning of society and organisations with an
intention to use that understanding to engage (where appropriate) in changing these
processes, practices and the profession. (Laughlin, 1999, p. 73)
This definition unites all the aspects that made NAH a distinct approach in the period in
which it emerged. And the fact that the focus is on society and organizations and on the
changing process, therefore not only complying with the “old” customs of research, enables
us to say that the rise of critical accounting is the first and perhaps the most important catalyst
for the emergence of NAH.
The second key catalyst is Anthony Hopwood himself and his work. As we mentioned
before, he founded AOS, one of the leading journals in accounting research, accounting
historical research and critical accounting. Furthermore his work encouraged accounting
researchers and people from other fields of research related with accounting to adopt
historical modes of research in their work. Hopwood’s article “The archaeology of
accounting systems” aimed:
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[T]o have indicated the ways in which historical (however recent that means) analyses
can give insight into accounting dynamics and, by recognising that the roles that
accounting serves cannot be considered in isolation of the practices of the craft, the
need for appreciations of the specific practices that constitute the craft and the
organisational processes which endow them with a significance and meaning.
(Hopwood, 1987, p.232)
Hopwood (1983, p.303) had earlier called for “more substantive investigations oriented
towards providing bases for understanding or explaining the workings of accounting in
action”. The growing interest for the organizational nature of accounting, accounting
constitutive role and social analysis of the accounting craft (Hopwood, 1985), not only from
the accounting researchers, but also from non-accountants such as economists, sociologists
and historians, acknowledged and supported by Hopwood in his work, gave a new path in
accounting and accounting history research that ultimately led to the Miller et al. article and
NAH. Hopwood was personally interested in history, and his receptiveness meant that
historical research within the interdisciplinary/critical accounting approach was acceptable to
AOS (which in the early 1980s was effectively the only outlet for such research).
The third and fourth catalysts are related with sociology as a science and more precisely with
Foucault’s work and the influence of the Marxist point of view receptive to history. The
most relevant influence of Foucault for our research is represented by his writings being
realized from a historical perspective. This is one aspect which emerged also from the
references to Foucault’s work analysed in MHL (1991). Two of the three works by Foucault
cited in that paper had a historical background, one of these two even going so far as to study
the theory of history. As for the Marxist point of view being receptive to history and
historical work and as for his influence in accounting and sociology research in general,
numerous papers study this (e.g. Lakatos, 1971; Ravetz and Westfall, 1981; Chua, 1986).
The contexts in which NAH arose
An issue that deserves our special attention and which was not debated in MHL (1991) is the
name chosen by MHL (if indeed they chose the name rather than Anthony Hopwood as
editor of the journal). The word “new” implies an element of novelty and originality but at
the same time it is an element that suffers a high degree of “degradation” over time (it loses
its allure of “new”). Starting with the early 1960s three disciplines closely related to historical
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accounting research, namely economic history, business history and social history, were
experiencing changes in their research methods, techniques and approaches used. The “new
economic history”, also known as cliometrics or econometric history (McCloskey, 1987; see
also Boldizzoni, 2011), which developed under the Nobel laureates Robert William Fogel and
Douglas Cecil North in the early 1960s, involved the application of neo-classical economic
theory and econometrics to the study of economic history. At the same time, a related field of
economy and accounting, business history, was experiencing changes under the influence of
Alfred D. Chandler, being called afterwards “the new business history”. The work of
Chandler, and the transaction cost economics developed by Oliver Williamson, inspired the
historical investigations of H. Thomas Johnson (1975), who stressed the value of accounting
history to the “new business history”. Johnson’s research underpinned the famous book
Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987),
while Hoskin and Macve (1988) examined the emerging roles of accounting in the
construction and maintenance of a modern concept of management as a way of challenging
Chandler’s conclusions.
Social history was passing through the same process of the modernization and “actualization”
of its research views. According to Veysey (1979, p. 4), the ideas of the “new” social history
can be summarized as follows:
History should be viewed in terms of the processes affecting the great majority of
people alive at any given time, with special attention to the anonymously
downtrodden, those whose standard of living and prestige are the lowest (this
corollary helped build a specious bridge toward Marxism), and that the historian
should be intensely skeptical of literary sources of evidence, always the product of a
small elite, instead making use of whatever bare quantitative data exist to assure that
one's conclusions are truly representative of the social aggregate being discussed.
Two more uses of the term “new” are worth considering. The first is the “new archaeology”
of the 1960s and 1970s. This area of research has some aspects that resonate with NAH: the
claim that previous archaeology was “atheoretical” and the claim of rapid change in
archaeology over a short period. Hopwood (1985, p. 366) famously described much
traditional accounting history research as “partial, uncritical, atheoretical and intellectually
isolated”. And just as the “new archaeology” confronted archaeologists with what Clarke
(1973) calls its “loss of innocence”, accounting historians were forced by the emergence of
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NAH to question their basic assumptions and to justify their usual reasoning in conducting
research. Secondly, the 1980s saw the appearance of “new historicism”, also grounded in
critical theory, as a new way of conducting research in history. The “new historicism”, like
NAH, has a basis in the work of Michel Foucault, particularly the notion of épistémes or
structures of thought in relation to cultural aspects. The applications of “new historicism” are
basically theoretical and academic as NAH was when it was conceived as a collection of
methods and methodologies for the purpose of conducting research in accounting history.
So, rather than being surprised by the emergence of NAH, we might ask why “new”
historical accounting research developed and evolved after these other “new histories”. The
words of Cyril Tomkins from an unpublished working paper are inspiring in portraying
accounting perspectives from the end of the 1970s:
Despite the current criticisms, the long run record of accounting is distinctly
encouraging. There have been occasions when accountants may not have reacted
quickly enough to the needs of the day’s society – for example the very slow pace
(and sometimes backward steps) of increasing disclosure of information through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, more currently, the failure to produce
acceptable inflation accounting rules and the lack of new methods to serve the special
needs of developing countries where western (USA and UK) accounting practices are
often of little direct relevance. However, if we take the broad span of history,
accounting has on the whole developed as and when required (Tomkins, 1978, p.9;
Napier, 2001, p. 22)
Richardson (2008, p. 250) describes the report of the American Accounting Association’s
Committee on Accounting History and the first World Congress of Accounting Historians,
both of which took place in 1970, as “marker events” for the emergence of accounting history
as an academic discipline rather than the pursuit of amateur historians. In 1974 the
Accounting History Committee for England and Wales (1972-1974) became the Accounting
History Society (Edwards and Walker, 2009). Although an organization charged with the
promotion and development of accounting history research:
By the mid-1970s, historical accounting research was a fringe activity, with a small
number of dedicated researchers and a rather larger group who combined an interest
in accounting history with research addressing more contemporary issues, working in
the context of a ‘mainstream’ of accounting researchers who had no interest in, and
indeed strong theoretical and methodological objections to, historical accounting
research. (Edwards and Walker, 2009)
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The context in which NAH arose includes also the relation between “old” accounting history
and the undergoing changes from the 1980s that later became known as NAH. The “old”
accounting history, meaning the traditional one, is somehow on a divergent path with NAH
regarding the sources used for their research and the primary objective of their work. It was
(and is still) the “old” accounting historian’s goal “to understand accounting as a set of
procedures or practices” whilst the “new” accounting historian “is concerned with how
accounting impacts on specific individuals and organizations, and more broadly on society”
(Edwards and Walker, 2009). Some historiographical questions were posed in the period
before MHL (1991) regarding the role of accounting history, the way of handling available
evidence or the lack any written or oral testimonies.
Forerunners of NAH
Continuing the rationale started before and calling on Foucault’s sociological bases presented
in the book The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972; 2002), we can use Gaston Bachelard’s
epistemological acts and thresholds as one of the conclusions about historical change and not
only:
they suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow
development, and force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and
its original motivations, cleanse it of imaginary complicities; they direct historical
analysis away from the search for silent beginnings, and the never-ending tracingback to the original precursors, towards the search for a new type of rationality and its
various effects. (Foucault, 2002, p. 4)
Driven by this “accumulation of knowledge” the logical step in the evolution of the
accounting history research was the accumulation of some of the most representative
theories, methods and methodologies under the “protection” of a single unitary terminology,
known as “The New Accounting History”.
In the period from 1980 to 1990, many of the papers published in AOS, whether historical or
not, were preparing us for this turn in accounting history research. Addressing new views in
how to run accounting research and accounting history research, Hopwood (1980, 1983,
1987) draws attention to the stance that accounting was becoming “what it was not”. As
Llewelyn (2003 p. 675) puts it, Hopwood “launched a new genre of research that aimed to
study accounting not as a technical abstraction but as a practice embedded in its
organizational setting. Initially, his work was seen as a call to theorize the relationship
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between accounting and organizing.” Although papers such as Burchell et al. (1980) and
Hopwood (1983) are not specifically historical, both of them enrol in the trend of “studying
accounting in the context in which it operates”, meaning an illustration of how accounting is
implicated in both organizational and social practice. During this period accounting research
is positioned in a direct relation with accounting practice and therefore with organizational
structures and practices, the environment that contains the true decision makers. These
changes in accounting research directly affected accounting history research as both are part
of the same body of research, and any changes in the first one affect the other.
Table 1 below identifies the most representative historical papers published in AOS. These
articles show how historical accounting research was evolving during this period and the
directions towards which this research was heading. During this period, AOS published other
historical papers that were not forerunners of NAH (for example, Chandler and Daems, 1979,
and Johnson, 1983, which made use of transaction cost economics), but by the late 1980s, the
historical papers published in the journal were predominantly contributions to NAH.
Year No.
Authors
Title
Pp.
1980
5:1
A. M. Tinker
Towards a political economy of accounting: an
empirical illustration of the Cambridge controversies
147-160
1982
7:2
A. M. Tinker, B.
D. Merino & M.
D. Neimark
The normative origins of positive theories: ideology
and accounting thought
167-200
1985
10:2
P. Armstrong
Changing management control strategies: the role of
competition between accountancy and other
organisational professions
129-148
1985
10:4
S. Burchell, C.
Clubb & A. G.
Hopwood
Accounting in its social context: towards a history of
value added in the United Kingdom
381-413
1986
11: 1
P. Miller
1986
11:2
K. W. Hoskin &
R. H. Macve
1986
11:2
A. Loft
1986
11:4/5
M. Neimark & T.
Tinker
1986
11:6
H. Willmott
Accounting for progress – national accounting and
planning in France: a review essay
Accounting and the examination: a genealogy of
disciplinary power
Towards a critical understanding of accounting: the
case of cost accounting in the U.K., 1914-1925
The social construction of management control
systems
Organising the profession: a theoretical and historical
examination of the development of the major
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83-104
105-136
137-169
369-395
555-582
T. Tinker &
M. Neimark
A. G. Hopwood
P. Miller &
T. O’Leary
1987
12:1
1987
12:3
1987
12:3
1987
12:5
1987
12: 5
1988
13:1
1988
13:4
A. G. Hopwood
1989
14:3
P. D. Bougen
1990
15:4
1990
15:5
P. Miller
P. Miller &
T. O’Leary
P. Armstrong
C. Lehman & T.
Tinker
K. W. Hoskin &
R. H. Macve
accountancy bodies in the U.K.
The role of annual reports in gender and class
contradictions at General Motors: 1917-1976
The archaeology of accounting systems
Accounting and the construction of the governable
person
The rise of accounting controls in British capitalist
enterprises
The “real” cultural significance of accounts
The genesis of accountability: the West Point
connection
On origins and development: some reflections on the
40th anniversary of Pergamon Press and the 65th
birthday of its founder, Robert Maxwell
The emergence, roles and consequences of an
accounting-industrial relations interaction
On the interrelations between accounting and the state
Making accountancy practical
71-88
207-234
235-266
415-436
503-522
37-74
329-332
203-234
315-340
479-498
Table 1 AOS accounting history papers, list vol. 1-30 (Source: Napier, 2006)
The translation of Foucault’s books into English, starting the early 1970s, assisted the
adoption of his theories into accounting research. The link between Foucault and NAH has
already been examined (for example, Stewart, 1992; Funnell, 1996; Fleischman and
Radcliffe, 2003; Napier, 2006). The 1980s also saw the appearance of Bruno Latour’s
theories. From the Actor-Network Theory, developed in the early 1980s together with Michel
Callon and John Law, to his major book, Science in Action (1987), his ideas became
important references in accounting research, being later adopted also in accounting history
research. Foucault and Latour were important reference points for both Burchell et al. (1985)
and Miller (1990, 1991).
Evidence of a growing interest in the directions in which accounting history research was
moving is also provided by authors such as Napier (1989) publishing in The British
Accounting Review, and the two papers in Abacus by Previts, Parker and Coffman (1990a,
1990b). Napier anticipates some of the underlying ideas of NAH, under the description
“contextualising accounting” (the influence of Hopwood is obvious here), although he also
tries to encourage quantitative accounting history research, using the cliometric approach
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associated with the “New Economic History”. Previts, Parker and Coffman, on the other
hand, tend to adopt a more traditionalist position. While showing some awareness of the
emerging NAH, they emphasize research topics that had already been studied extensively by
traditional accounting historians.
Birth of the idea of “The New Accounting History”
The AOS issue on “The New Accounting History”
Even though historical accounting research of a critical/interdisciplinary nature had been
appearing since the late 1970s, the article that consecrated the concept of “the new
accounting history” is MHL (1991). Although this is the first mention of “the new accounting
history” as a unitary phrase that does not mean that it is also the first appearance of the ideas
behind it. Hopwood and Johnson (1986) refer to “new accounting historians” in their defence
of the legitimacy of accounting history research, but this term embraced historians such as
Johnson, influenced by econometric history, as well as the critical accounting historians.
Tinker and Neimark (1988, p. 55), in one of the earliest published reviews of critical
historiographies of accounting, write of “new histories” in general and “new accounting
historians” in particular, but, as Gaffikin (2011, p. 248) has noted, it was MHL (1991) “that
seems to have attracted greater attention”. This may be because the Tinker and Neimark
(1988) paper appeared in the very first issue of a new journal, Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal (AAAJ), whereas MHL (1991) was published by a longer-established
journal.
The paper introduces a double issue (volume 16, numbers 5 and 6) of AOS, which was
dedicated to historical accounting research papers that had their origins in the Second
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA) Conference, held in Manchester in 1988.
Hopper (who had also co-organized the First IPA Conference in 1985), Laughlin and Miller
had been the conference organizers, and had already been involved in introducing an issue of
AAAJ under the title “Contextual studies of accounting and auditing” (Laughlin et al., 1989).
As well as AOS and AAAJ, a third journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) was to
begin publishing in 1990. However, many presenters at the IPA looked to AOS as the first
choice for submitting their papers. Laughlin (interview 10 June 2013) has told us that there
was no specific “call for papers” underlying the NAH issue of AOS (special issues were to
become a feature of AAAJ – see Carnegie, 2012). The papers that appeared in the NAH issue
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had been submitted to the standard peer review process for AOS. Anthony Hopwood would
sometimes create special sections or issues by collating papers on a particular theme that
happened to be submitted at roughly the same time, and there were enough critical
accounting history papers accepted for publication by early 1991 to justify the issue. The first
draft of MHL (1991) paper was largely written by Peter Miller, according to Laughlin
(interview 10 June 2013), and he and Hopper suggested some small changes. Laughlin is
unsure who actually came up with the paper’s title, and it is possible that Hopwood decided
to give the name “The New Accounting History” to the issue as a whole (this title appears,
along with the publisher’s imprint but nothing else, on an unnumbered page at the front of the
issue) before MHL (1991) paper was titled.
The MHL (1991) paper
To begin with, the label “new accounting history” needs an introduction, an explanation of
the meaning of these “new” ideas behind accounting history research. Interestingly, NAH
tends to be explained negatively, in terms of what it is not. According to MHL (1991, p. 396;
see also Napier, 2006, p. 455):
The new accounting history that has emerged … does not represent a unitary research
programme with definite theoretical boundaries. It can be seen instead as a loose
assemblage of often quite disparate research questions and issues.
The authors’ opinion concerning the nature of NAH is quite clear, and they even suggest that
it should not be used as a methodology or a framework in itself, but more as an intermediate
point to the use of the methods and methodologies it assembles. Furthermore, they add that:
The new accounting history is not a “school” and does not entail subscribing to a
particular conceptual schema, but is an approach to the past of accounting that draws
upon a heterogeneous range of theoretical approaches. It is less a method than a way
of posing questions and of understanding their significance, one which opens up
differential possibilities for criticism and change by depriving existent practices of
their self-evidence and immutability. (MHL, 1991, p.400)
From the point of view of the historical research methodology, there is the risk of analysing
NAH through the present lens of accounting and history research hence we have witnessed its
evolution in this period, of more than two decades, since it came to life. As Napier states,
“one of the dangers in attempting to understand the past is that of viewing it too much in
terms of the present” (Napier, 1989, p. 241). And moreover, according to Topolski (1990, p.
325) “it is self-evident that the way historians explain the past depends more or less directly
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on how they understand that past in its most general shape”. Extrapolating this statement,
although none of the authors was an historian by profession, we can state that the same rule
applies in the case of MHL (1991), since they present NAH from an historical perspective
and the majority of the references are historical ones.
We are trying to leave our preconceptions and knowledge about the present status of NAH
aside and examine it through the lens of the authors, using their “explanations” at that
moment and through the lens of the paper itself in which it was introduced as a new concept.
We will begin our analysis with the citations and the bibliography and we will build our
explanations on this basis. One of the “curiosities” that stands out even on a superficial
analysis is that, out of 34 bibliographical references, containing 27 books and 7 articles, there
is not a single reference to an accounting history paper or book. This applies not only to
specific historical accounting studies but also to discussions of historical accounting research,
such as those of Tinker and Neimark (1988), Napier (1989) and Previts et al (1990a, 1990b),
which the authors could clearly have cited as points of reference, let alone references to the
seminal papers of Hopwood. A possible explanation could be that MHL (1991) intended the
paper to stand primarily as an introduction to the collection of historical studies in
accounting, presented in that issue of AOS, rather than a general statement of position, but the
absence of any reference to prior critical/interdisciplinary historical accounting studies tends
to highlight the apparent “newness” of NAH.
history, theory of history
13
medicine, social medicine, psychiatry,
medical psychology
6
hermeneutics, philosophy, discourse,
learning
5
Statistics (including social aspects)
3
legal, legal history, common law
3
insurance, insurance technology
2
anthropology (culture and social
science), social anthropology, ethnology
2
5 secondary history theme
4 secondary philosophy
theme
Table 2 Miller et al. article references classification
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Going further with the analysis, we have identified seven major themes (containing also
subthemes or related fields) in a classification of these bibliographical references – these are
shown in Table 2. The main theme is that of history or theory of history with 13 references,
while 5 of the remaining 21 references have history as a secondary theme. This is followed
by medicine, social medicine, psychiatry or medical psychology with 6 references.
Hermeneutics, philosophy, discourse and learning are present as a primary theme in 5
references and as a secondary theme in a further 4 references. These are followed by two
main groups, statistics (including social aspects) and legal, legal history and common law,
each with 3 sources. The last two main themes are insurance and insurance technology and
anthropology (including culture and social science), social anthropology and ethnology, each
with 2 sources. Several of these themes were specifically identified by MHL (1991, p. 396),
who state that “practitioners” of accounting history “come from and draw upon a variety of
disciplines including anthropology, economics, history of science, organization theory and
sociology”.
As we can observe from the table above, history is the main theme in the paper and the core
of the structure of the paper, although in most cases “many of the practitioners of the ‘new
accounting history’ are not trained historians dedicated to recounting the past ‘as it really
happened’ ” (MHL, 1991, p. 396). Drawing on history and theory of history, the paper has in
the centre the idea of “objectivity” or the “objectivity question”. The primary reference on
this is Peter Novick’s recently-published book That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity
Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988), which explores the issue of
objectivity in history by examining mainstream American history in the 20th century, a
domain that, according to MHL (1991), evolved and influenced in the meantime accounting
history research. MHL’s phrase “as it really happened” is borrowed from the well-known
positivist historian Leopold von Ranke (wie es eigentlich gewesen), somehow modified since
the original translation which was “as it really was” or “as it actually was” (Novick, 1988, p.
28). According to Novick, the “as it really happened” version can be traced back to the
American professional historians and to the work of the Romanian historian and philosopher
of religion Mircea Eliade (1959, p.9). This historical objectivity includes in the context of
MHL (1991, p. 396):
[A] commitment to the reality of the past, and to historical truth as correspondence to
that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, as well as between facts
~ 13 ~
and fiction; a notion that historical facts are prior to and independent of interpretation;
and a view that historical truth is unitary rather than perspectival.
Novick’s own opinion on historical objectivity is that it’s not “true or false, right or wrong: I
find it not just essentially contested, but essentially confused.” (Novick, 1988, p. 6) and
besides that “some of the key elements in the objectivist synthesis I consider psychologically
and sociologically naive”. Objectivity is perceived according to his vision as a matter of fact,
a primary nature of historical research and there is no need to debate the actual existence or
lack of objectivity as it is similar to “making an empty observation; to say something neither
interesting nor useful” (Novick, 1988, p. 6). Other historians, such as Froude (1867, p. 1;
quoted by Lister, 1984, p. 50), state that if objective history is eliminated, history becomes “a
child’s box of letters with which we can spell any word we please”. Indeed, some of the
components of objectivity presented above are “ideal” at a theoretical level, but due to their
position in the evolution of historical science they suffered changes, or rather, changes
consistent with the reality of historical research. Consequently, as MHL (1991, p. 397)
observe:
The separation of facts and values may no longer be viewed so rigidly by some; the
notion of ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’ may be rather less widely or rigidly
adhered to; and there may be more emphasis on interpretations being tested by facts
instead of being derived from them.
We need to be careful here. Gaffikin (2011) points out an obvious difference between
historiography as “the writing and hence creation of history” (p. 236) and accounting history
research as it has actually emerged, which leads us to query the extent to which “new
accounting history” should really be regarded not as history (even of the “social history”
genre) but rather as historical sociology. NAH is not perceived as a truly historical-based
collection of methods and methodologies, but more of an attempt to adopt an undergoing
current that was already taking place in history and sociology involving:
[A] spill of creative energy into neighbouring fields, specifically in this instance to
cultivate a sociologically fertilized history or to protect good historical grain from
encroaching sociological weeds. At the very least some historians and some
sociologists, faced with challenges to their various knowledge claims from within
their own disciplines, have turned respectively to sociology and history to reinforce
cases which they have felt the resources of their own disciplines inadequate to defend
(Abrams, 1980, p. 4)
~ 14 ~
Then again, should NAH include at all in its name the word history? We pose this query due
to this questioning of NAH not being truly a historical sociology and begin answering it by
making use of a debate that was taking place in the end of 1970s and the beginning of the
1980s. And that is, by appealing to the notion of “class” as a difference of perception between
history and sociology and its implications on the new trend of research in accounting history.
According to Abrams (1980), although these two disciplines have different views on primary
aspects, they have an intrinsic relation and in the end:
It is the problem of finding a way of accounting for human experience which
recognizes simultaneously and in equal measure that history and society are made by
constant, more or less purposeful, individual action and that individual action,
however purposeful, is made by history and society. (Abrams, 1980, p. 7)
A late stage of the process of a partial convergence between history and sociology was taking
place at the time at the appearance of the first signs of NAH. According to Abrams, the early
1980s were a period when “some historians and some sociologists” were making significant
“efforts to hammer out ways of analysing process which transcend the exhausted modes of
narrative history and scientific history just as they transcend the exhausted modes of the two
sociologies” (i.e., a sociology of action and a sociology of system). Through this process it
was stated that narrative “lost its old innocence” becoming not a mere way of stating and
recording what happened, as was also the case of “traditional” accounting history, but rather
something “understood as an attempt to recover the movement of human agency as
structuring”, actively interrogated by theory, or in other words, a considerable part of the
vision proliferated by the “new” accounting historians that helped to build the basis of NAH
or that of those who adhered to NAH. Calls for the unity of history and sociology came from
renowned sociologists such as C. Wright Mills, E. A. Shils, John Barnes or Pierre Bourdieu
but most of these attempts took place within Marxism, which has already been identified as a
factor in the rise of NAH. And moreover, according to Giddens (1991, p. 230), “what history
is, or should be, cannot be analyzed in separation from what the social sciences are or should
be .... There simply are no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social
sciences and history - appropriately conceived.” Owing to this trend for a “theoretical unity”
between history and sociology, NAH had the “proper” background of knowledge to build its
foundation and to call for an approach in accounting history based on these prior findings.
NAH can be seen as a research stream with deep sources in historical sociology and “new
~ 15 ~
history”, developing from its earlier stages of development into a sociological type of
research.
The MHL (1991) paper adopts a discursive writing style with narrative accents, which
reflects the style of critical/interpretive accounting history research of the 1980s. From the
first sentence, the logic of the text is causally based, and leads us to conclude that the
emergence and evolution of NAH is a natural one:
In the space of less than a decade accounting history has come to occupy a significant
position within the discipline of accounting. …
Recent developments in accounting history have gone hand in hand with a change of
fortune. …
New ways of posing questions about the past of accounting have become possible as a
result. Taken together, these interrelated shifts are of such an order as to entitle us to
speak of “the new accounting history”. (MHL, 1991, p. 395)
Even where theorists are referred to, this is restricted to a listing of names (with a footnote
providing specific references):
Whether it was the writings of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, E. H.
Gombrich, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, E. P.
Thompson or Peter Winch that were drawn upon in the challenge to the ideal of
historical objectivity is less important than the overall effect. (MHL, 1991, p. 397)
This is a comprehensive enumeration of well-known authors from a wide range of
disciplines, from history to sociology, statistics, anthropology and others. However, as MHL
(1991) have not referred to any accounting history publications, it is not clear what work is
“drawing on” these theorists. However, MHL (1991, p. 402) warn about the use of the ideas
of theorists:
… there is a question of broadening and extending still further the theoretical
apparatus deployed within accounting history. This is not a matter of dabbling briefly
in the work of this or that theorist and then applying the newly-found concepts to
accounting history.
The final paragraph of the paper (MHL, 1991, p. 402) contains a direct reference to the work
of Reinhart Koselleck (a German historiographer) and a general one to the work of the Italian
microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg (1980), but none to the above mentioned authors.
~ 16 ~
What it does mean is examining the work of historians in fields other than accounting,
and assessing the extent to which they enable new questions to be posed or existing
research agendas to be refined or modified.
The reference to microhistory may have reflected the influence of one of the authors
mentioned earlier: Clifford Geertz and his book from 1973, Interpretation of Cultures.
According to Williams (1999, pp. 62-63) the anthropological technique called “thick
description”, closely associated with Geertz, is similar to microhistory. “Thick description”,
as Levi (1990, p. 98) puts it, “starts from a set of signifying signs and tries to put them into an
intelligible structure”, while microhistory “uses a similar approach to produce a richness of
explanation and provides a way of teasing out some of the interwoven threads of human life”
(Stanford, 1994). This raises the question as to why microhistory has not been perceived as a
central part of this new way of conducting research in accounting history – very few studies
explicitly identify themselves as “microhistories” (examples include Williams, 1999,
Carnegie and Walker, 2007, and Lee, 2008).
It is not clear which aspect of Koselleck’s work is being referred to, and which questions are
enabled to be posed through the lens of this particular book cited (Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time – 1985/2004). Kosellek is particularly identified with “history
of concepts”, something he worked on from the late 1950s (Andersen, 2003). Some
commentators have seen similarities between the ideas of Foucault and those of Koselleck.
Although Keith Tribe has claimed, in his introduction to the 2004 edition of Koselleck’s
book, that Foucault was not a historian but Koselleck was, the influence of the latter’s ideas
could be picked up from Foucault’s book, Surveillir et Punir (1975). Both authors were
promoters of ideologies “forming social and political actors” (Edwards, 2007), maintaining
the contests and struggles in which they participate being ultimately crucial notions for
understanding social, political and ideological change in a world that was facing constant
changes.
According to Paul Langley (2008, p. 27) NAH draws on Actor Network-Theory (henceforth
ANT), but his statement is not supported by a clear reference. Moreover, there is no direct
liaison in MHL (1991) that can be made at a methodological level and that could allow us,
without doubt, to clarify this aspect of NAH development in this early stage. Although the
theory was developed earlier in the 1980s, Langley is probably thinking of Bruno Latour’s
book, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, published
~ 17 ~
in English translation in 1987 by Harvard University Press, as being the main influence on
MHL. Laughlin (interview 10 June 2013) confirmed that MHL were aware of Latour’s work,
but he is not cited specifically in the paper. The connection between NAH and ANT will be
examined in the next sub-section.
The other papers in the NAH issue of AOS
Besides the presumed theoretical adhesion to ANT, there is a more definite use of
sociological theories in MHL (1991) and in some other articles presented in the NAH issue of
AOS. These are the theories of Michael Foucault. We can trace the influence of Foucault in
the discussion of MHL on the other six articles, and that discussion, together with a reading
of the other articles, allows us to construct a basis for NAH. MHL start with Grahame
Thompson’s article, “Is accounting rhetorical? Methodology, Luca Pacioli and printing”,
which presents the rhetorical aspects of accounting using a linguistic method to re-analyze
“how and why accounting in its particular modern form emerged” and using also a reference
to four crucial institutions from that period that influenced this emergence: the church, the
pedagogic apparatus, the publishing house and the commercial organizations. Analyzing this
article in terms of the presence of one of the two great directions of research in accounting
which characterize NAH, the use of Foucault or Latour’s sociological and philosophical
ideas, the Thompson article uses Foucault’s ideas, as can be seen in Table 3 below, meaning
rhetoric (and linguistic model but concentrates on the theory of discourse). It is interesting to
note that Thompson’s article could be described as “history of accounting”, as he is
attempting to understand a treatise that sets out methods and procedures of accounting. This
is not the case for some of the other studies in the special issue, which focus more on the
impact of accounting on organizations, the economy, and society.
Following the same logic and using some of the findings from Napier (2006), we analyzed
from two perspectives the other six articles published in this issue of AOS. The first one is the
order in which the papers are discussed in MHL (1991) and the (different) order in which the
papers appear in the issue and the other is the content, the theory and themes approached.
~ 18 ~
Order in
article
1
2
3
4
5
6
Order in
AOS
Author(s)
Title
Grahame
Thompson
Is accounting
rhetorical?
Methodology, Luca
Pacioli and printing
R.A. Bryer
Accounting for the
“railway mania” of
1845— A great
railway swindle?
5
Keith
Robson
On the arenas of
accounting change:
The process of
translation
3
Sonja
Gallhofer,
James
Haslam
The aura of
accounting in the
context of a crisis:
Germany and the
first world war
6
2
1
4
Trevor
Hopper,
Peter
Armstrong
Cost accounting,
controlling labour
and the rise of
conglomerates
Sten
Jönsson
Role making for
accounting while
the state is
watching
Pages.
572599
439486
547570
487520
405438
521546
Period
analysed
Themes approached
Comments made by Miller et al. (1991)
“Foucauldian” ideas
Latour's ideas
15th/16th C.
Use of the linguistic model
within accounting discourse
and the related interest in
rhetorical formulations
institutional matrix of key institutions such as
the Church, pedagogic apparatus, the publishing
house and commercial organizations, through
which double-entry bookkeeping emerged in
the sixteenth century
Yes, Archaeology of
knowledge, rhetoric
(linguistic model but
concentrates on the
theory of discourse)
-
1830-1850s
Functioning of accounting in
the social, economic and
political contexts
surrounding the financing of
the early U K. roadways
the historical assessment of the financing of the
early U.K. railways also depends on particular
institutional arrangements, in this case the
relations between accounting and capitalism in
the mid-nineteenth century
-
-
Late 1960s
Relationship of accounting
practice to the social context
(social change)
Relations between the profession and the
states, the importance of particular arenas of
accounting change, and the capacity of the
government to intervene in the economy are at
stake when it comes to the significance of
apparently localized events
Yes, genealogical
method (a
genealogical
narrative of
contingencies)
Yes,
translation
process as
part of the
concept of
arena
1870-1910s
Critical theory (Frankfurt
School) (Napier, 2006) and
theorizing of the conflictenhancing potential of
accounting
The aura of accounting - the notion that
accounting has an objectivity, soundness and
neutrality that is specific to it - can help not only
in the resolution of conflicts but also in their
enhancement during specific crisis periods
-
-
19-20th C.
Labour histories of control,
labour process
Illustrates how developments in cost accounting
can be understood as rooted in conflicts that
centre on control of the labour process,
whether these conflicts be the destruction of
internal subcontracting and craft control of
production in early factories, or those
associated with current techniques and
ideologies of control
Influenced by other
Foucauldian inspired
works as they state
(Hopper, Armstrong,
p.406)
-
20th C.
"Accounting made legitimate
through reflecting concerns
of its social and political
environment " (Napier, 2006)
; culture as an explanation in
accounting change
Investigates transformations in State, Municipal,
Financial and Management Accounting in
Sweden; programmes like Taylorism or
programme budgeting provide arguments for
reforms
Use of
"archaeological"
items (Foucault,
1982) (Jönsson, p.
522)
-
Table 3 Articles published in the Issue 5-6 of AOS, 1991
~ 19 ~
MHL (1991) apparently structured their discussion of the papers in terms of the chronological
order of the historical periods analyzed. The only exception is the article of Keith Robson
which, although it should be fifth in terms of chronology, is the third paper to be discussed by
MHL, after Rob Bryer’s Marx-inspired “great railway swindle” paper investigating British
railway accounting in the 19th century. The explanation for this situation is that the narrative
of the paper determined the logical presence of the Robson paper, although it refers to a latter
historical period of analysis. The idea of the development of accounting in time and space
and as a body of knowledge is followed by MHL and closely analyzed by Robson through the
lens of accounting and social change, making use of Latour’s arena and translation terms and
of Foucault’s genealogical method. The authors continue with an examination of Sonja
Gallhofer and Jim Haslam’s paper as a conclusion of the idea started before. Robson’s paper
is also the only one that implements theories and ideas from both Foucault and Latour.
In 1991 Miller, working with Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon, was promoting ideas that
Foucault had expressed much earlier (in fact in 1968) that we can identify as part of the NAH
philosophy, for example:
The history of ‘ideas’ or ‘sciences’ must no longer be written as a mere checklist of
innovations, it must be a descriptive analysis of the different transformations
effectuated. (Foucault, Politics and the study of discourse, 1991, p.58, The Foucault
effect: studies in governmentality)
Also in 1992 Peter Miller published another article on the objectivity theme which is strongly
influenced by Foucault’s work, “Accounting and objectivity: The invention of calculating
selves and calculable spaces. Although Miller (1992) does not refer directly to Peter Novick’s
work, it is likely that issues of objectivity were of particular interest to Miller.
One of the ideas that positions NAH on a higher research hierarchy is that it presumes “that
the study of accounting history is capable of assuming a more central position within the
social sciences more generally” and at the same time “a concern with language, with the
rationales and ideologies for accounting practices, comes to assumes a prominent role in the
new accounting history” (MHL, 1991, p.398). This concern with language is a theme debated
earlier by linguists and historians because “the facts of the vocabulary are intimately tied to
facts of civilization” (Cahen, 1921, p.1; Mills, 1989). History is a discipline that “treats
utterances widely separated in time, space and tongue” (Handlin, 1979, p.165) and the main
reason for such a concern is the obvious need of a greater knowledge of the basic unit of
~ 20 ~
language by all those who wish to undertake a research in this field of knowledge and in
those derived from it (e.g. accounting history).
Another particular aspect of NAH is its “focus on shifts in the forms of knowledge or
expertise that typifies accounting at a particular moment in time and in a certain social
context, whether this be a particular national or a more local cultural setting” (MHL, 1991, p.
399). The final section of the paper (pages 400 to 402) represents a tribute to accounting
history research and evolution but also an insight into the future of accounting history
research. MHL begin their justification with a statement that major processes and sources of
understanding are “by their very nature historical”. There are three major outlines of this
construction. The first one is the link between these processes and their historical nature
which “entail transformations in accounting practices and in the rationales that give them
significance”. This leads to the idea of “contemporary relevance of accounting history” that
can be demonstrated and this demonstration is exactly the occurrence of the ideas that lead to
a new approach called “new accounting history”. The third outline is the context in which
NAH appeared, namely in a context that had to do “with calling for a historical appreciation
of the formation of accounting practices and rationales” (p. 400). It is a context that includes
dangers in conducting research within the accounting history discipline, which consist in
overlooking the very nature of this type of research, a nature that is “sui generis rather than
derivative”.
Also in this section of the paper we can identify some of the most prolific and widely used
ideas of NAH, such as the study of accounting past making use of “social relations within
which it is embedded” and the relationship with management. Also something that arises in
that particular period is a type of research that could be themed as “a history of the history of
accounting” and we could state that it is part of the NAH research approach. Generalizing,
the authors assume that the intensive changes that accounting and accounting history research
were undergoing were due to these being “under pressure or approaching a state of crisis” (p.
401). But this generalization has a weak basis, aside the likewise work from kindred
disciplines because, as they state themselves, “whether accounting is itself undergoing such a
self-questioning and with what possible consequences is difficult to say” (p. 401).
The future developments and goals of the accounting history research are not neglected by
the authors as they conclude the article stating that “existing theoretical agendas need to be
~ 21 ~
developed and refined in relation to different events and processes” and draw attention to the
need to “extend still further the theoretical apparatus deployed within accounting history”.
All these are of such importance for accounting history because of the turn it took in
becoming one of the most promising research areas in accounting and to avoid the risk of
losing the “impetus” it had gained by 1991.
Conclusions
Resistance to change tends to be great and the particular forms taken by a certain change do
not necessarily please all the actors in a particular research field. But nonetheless, these
changes, however unpleasant they may be for some of them, are a future benefit for that
discipline and their practitioners and researchers, because without change there is no
development. This is also the case for accounting history researchers with the emergence of
NAH in the decade to 1991. The current of change could not have been stopped and all the
catalysts involved in this process were concurring in the rise of NAH. The most influential
factors were the emergence of critical accounting research in the 1970s, Tony Tinker’s
emphasis on “historical materialism”, Anthony Hopwood’s personal interest in history, and
the availability of AOS for critical/interdisciplinary historical accounting research during the
1980s.
After studying the original article in itself, we are able to draw a few conclusions. NAH is not
something that denies “old” accounting historians’ beliefs, but more of an alternative, a new
and different point of view on how to conduct this type of research. It is a unifying concept
that assembles methods, ideas and theoretical approaches under one single “label”. It is not
something that was imposed by those who adhered to its beliefs, but more of a logical
evolution in the accounting historical research paradigm given all the changes from the
adjacent scientific fields.
This paper represents an interim report on an ongoing research project. This will involve two
aspects. First, there is still a need to obtain a full view of the circumstances surrounding the
emergence of NAH, and we plan to build on our interview with Richard Laughlin by talking
to other key players. Secondly, we plan to follow up the subsequent use of the NAH concept
~ 22 ~
in the accounting history literature. Gaffikin (2011, p. 237) suggested that “since Miller et al.
(1991) the high priests have manoeuvred opinions back to more traditional approaches and I
have concluded that there has been a ‘conservative turn’ in accounting history”. He
concluded: “I do not believe the accounting history community has effectively come to terms
with the full meaning of a ‘new accounting history’” (2011, p. 236). If Gaffikin’s intuition is
valid, then we need to investigate what went wrong with “the new accounting history”.
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